Sunday, March 29, 2015

Do you manage your vacation rental with Excel?

If you are like me with just one vacation rental property, you may have built a spreadsheet to manage inquires, bookings, rent and availability. You might be tired of all the manual work but feel like an expensive software product or cloud-based subscription service just isn't worth it. That's where I was. Then I took a hard look at the Google Apps platform and had an idea - what if I used Google App Script to write a program that automates the whole vacation rental management process? The platform is perfect for it:

Google Docs for contracts and invoice letters

Google Forms for rental inquiries

Google Calendar for managing availability and schedules

Gmail to send reminders and alerts

Google Sheets to create a single dashboard

Google Contacts to keep track of vacation rental customers

Google Drive to store everything including signed scanned contracts

I embarked on the project 3 years ago, and have been using earlier versions for years with our vacation rental, the Lodge at Palmer Lake. This week I finished the initial release of a version to make public. I call it 'TrackVacs', for tracking vacation rentals.

The cool thing? Google offers the entire platform for free.

You can click here to set up TrackVacs for your vacation rental at no cost. Try it out, you will get a lot of time back. If you appreciate it and want to contribute, that would be fantastic.

What parts of vacation rental management can be automated?

A great deal. Here is how software can greatly simplify the whole life cycle of having someone rent your property:

A few clicks sends a pre-written email to a prospective renter with an inquiry form.

When the rental inquiry is received, the code then:

Validates the requested dates against other bookings and rules. If an issue is found, a window pops up with options to address it.

Creates a calendar event for the stay and to set aside time for cleaning if desired.

Calculates the rent based on seasonal rate structures, extra costs for more people and cleaning fees as applicable.

Creates a Contact for your new customer, complete with all their contact info.

Builds an invoice letter and rental contract with all of the details of the renter's group, a breakdown of fees and sales tax, check in/out dates and times, payment due dates and contract terms.

Provides immediate visibility via the dashboard to key elements of each booking, and quick 2-click access to the associated documents and calendar entries.

Sends email reminders to the right parties automatically as payment due dates approach, rent is overdue or deposits need to be returned.

Offers filtering options in the dashboard to get simpler views as bookings grow.

Want to know more?

Want to try it?

It's free. To get started, check out this installation guidethat describes the setup step by step with screenshots.Any feedback is very appreciated, let me know what you think and how to make it better!

Hi, I'm Dana Young. I developed this TrackVacs vacation rental management software system for vacation rental owners who have just a few properties or just one. If that is you, give it a try.

The original idea came as a result of all the time I was spending managing our vacation rental, the Lodge at Palmer Lake. My mom manages the property onsite and I handle all of the guest inquiries and bookings. I also have a demanding full time career at a tech company, so it was a pain to do a lot of manual spreadsheet work in the evenings handling the lodge business. I started thinking about how it could be automated, and focused on Google Apps as a platform to do that. I started by hiring a developer to build the code because I had neither the time nor the expertise. He pulled together an initial version based on a spec I wrote. For the last few years I have been using it and it has saved me a ton of time.

One day I thought wow others could get a lot of value out of this too. I set about learning javascript and many hundreds of hours later pulled together about 3x the original code into what I'm calling TrackVacs.

I hope you get a lot of value out of it like I do as you manage your vacation rental.